Chapter 23

Author’s note: [ and ] delineate mind-to-mind dialog.

The next step was to make some fuses and test them for consistency in burning rate. I had no idea of a way to make a fuse that would set off the powder upon contact. The only way I could think of to make the hand grenade explode was to have a burning fuse, so my first choice was the fuse used with the firebombs. That fuse was reliable, and that was what the hand grenade needed—a reliable flame to set it off.

I had my assistants make up the raw material for a fuse and put a thin coating on a large piece of cloth. I would test the cloth to see what kind of burning rate I got. Hopefully, it would be consistent enough to make an acceptable fuse. The testing was kind of episodic for the fuses because the enemy had decided to resume the attacks, and my assistants were required to work with the ballistas that were our main source of defense.

Dammit, to sum up our testing, we never could get a consistent enough burning rate from this fuse. There was no other solution—I had to come up with a contact fuse! Well, the work on that was going to have to wait.

This time, the attack was set up so that the enemy troops were more dispersed. That made it much more difficult for us to find suitable targets for the firebombs. This time the attack returned to our front and concentrated on the area of the gate in the outer wall. Enough troops did attack the other three sides of our rectangular wall so that we were forced to split our forces, but we were able to put most of our defense at the front wall.

The entire wall had its scorpions manned, but most of the crossbowmen were sent to the front wall, the one with the gate. It looked like the enemy strategy was to divert as much of our attention as possible away from the front wall while enough men tried to get inside the wall to open the gate. That would give the mercenaries free access directly to our fort. We could see a supply of 40-foot scaling ladders just waiting to be used against the fort’s walls.

We were caught on the horns of a dilemma. We could lob firebombs at the men attacking the outer wall as they got close to the wall, but that raised the strong possibility that we would set our own defense on fire. It looked as if we were going to have to bite the bullet and take a chance on setting that wall on fire, or at least weakening it. The scorpions and crossbowmen just could not kill enough attackers to keep them completely away from the wall.

The attackers did not have enough ranged weapons to make much difference. They would have to scale the wall for hand-to-hand fighting, and they would overwhelm the women who were doing the majority of the manning of our weapons there.

Certainly, Damon and his cavalry could be used against the attackers once they got inside the wall, but they would eventually be worn down by the great number of attackers who would be much less concerned with casualties. Of course we would have scorpions and crossbows on the fort’s roof, but we did not have the thousands of missiles necessary to defend ourselves from the entire army of mercenaries. No question about it—we were in big trouble!

This is when the hand grenades would have done us a world of good, but there was no way that I could have any of them ready in time to help. We were going to have to win with conventional weapons. At least, if the enemy got too close for the Little Boys to shoot at them, we could throw five-incher firebombs over the wall by hand and hope that they did not set the fort on fire. That would have to be our defense of last resort, but I was afraid that we would come to that.

I had my crew start preparing enough of the napalm mix to fill all of the shell casings that we had and to stack them on the roof where they would be easy to reach. It was in the process of thinking about hand throwing the firebombs that it dawned on me that our hand grenades should resemble the “stick grenades” used by the German Army in WWII that I had seen on TV. None of our people were used to throwing balls, but everybody could throw a stick, which was the great virtue of the German design.

Further thought about the pottery stick grenade design made me think of a fuse system for the grenade. The stick or neck of the grenade had to be hollow to allow filling the grenade with the blasting powder. Therefore, if the pottery were fired with a stick in place to form the neck, then a stick could slide down the neck and compress the air inside the grenade. Viola! The stick could function as the piston of a fire starter. The diesel effect of the piston rapidly compressing the air could heat the air hot enough to set off the blasting powder, at least I hoped so.

I would have to do some experimenting to get the dimensions perfected, but that would have to wait until after this war was won. It was a cinch that Hippolyte and I would not survive if we lost the war with the mercenaries! Well, I would worry about that later.

At this point, the mercenaries were attacking our wall in force, and we had to start pulling crossbowmen and scorpion crews back away from the wall. They could not kill attackers fast enough to keep them from reaching the wall. The crossbowmen covered the scorpion crews as they dismantled their weapons and ran with them for the door to the fort.

The scorpion crews headed with their weapons to the roof of the fort and set up as soon as they got there. Then, they provided cover to the crossbowmen as they ran to the fort. We lost very few people because the enemy had to get within reach to directly attack our people as they ran away. The covering fire from the roof did a lot to save the women as they ran toward the fort.

Once a portion of the outer wall had been abandoned, all of it had to be abandoned, so we actually had more people than could be accommodated on the roof. As soon as all of our people had come in from the outer wall, we sent out our infantry and cavalry to take on the mercenaries who scaled the outer wall and came through the opened gate. Our plastic armor gave us a decided advantage over the mercenaries, but their vast numbers compared to us seemed to counteract that.

The situation changed when we gave up trying to keep from hitting our outer wall with the firebombs. The five-inchers rained down on the mercenaries as they came over the wall and through the gate. The bodies collected in piles as the attackers had to climb over them as they came toward us. Many of the piles of bodies were set on fire, and that slowed the advance of the enemy even more.

I have no idea how many of the enemy were killed by our infantry and cavalry, but it had to be a substantial number. There had to be at least a thousand dead bodies around the fort, and the vast majority of them were mercenaries. I do not know why, but the steam seemed to run out of the mercenary attack, and they gave up before they were able to mount a direct attack on the fort. None of the long scaling ladders had been brought past the outer fence before the attack simply collapsed.

We were surprised at what we had been able to accomplish, but we were almost too tired to move when the fight finally petered out. Thank Ares for Hippolyte’s insistence on physical training, even for the women soldiers. I was sure that they now appreciated what she had put them through. The enemy did ask for a truce to recover the wounded, and we went along with that.

The next morning, there was a repeat of the attack on us. We really missed having our wall, and we could not hold the rush of the mercenaries back from our fort. They brought their long ladders and did their damnedest to get them to our walls, but every time we saw a scaling ladder approach us, we had all of the Little Boys that could register to try to hit them with five-inch firebombs. That we were able to do, and the enemy could not reach us with enough ranged weapons to make any difference.

Our scorpions and crossbowmen were kept at a furious pace with so many targets anywhere they looked. I do not know how many we killed, but Hippolyte said that the mercenaries could not stand that rate of loss of manpower—they would have to give up soon! I am not sure what triggered it, but the attack petered out again just as it had the previous day. There was a lot of activity in the mercenary camp that afternoon, and we lobbed in a few of the 10-incher firebombs via Big Boy #1 just to make sure that the mercenaries knew that we were still defiant.